On August 19, at the White House Technology Leaders Summit, Chainlink founder Sergey Nazarov stood next to Trump, giving a speech about the impact of tokenization on the U.S. economy, with the heads of the SEC and CFTC also present. The weight of the stage was self-evident.
Compared to the eccentric figures in the circle, Nazarov's growth path seems closer to the lives of ordinary people. He showed us how a liberal arts student with no strong background or top-notch technical foundation could, through solid effort, trial and error, and adjustment, rise to the core position of the industry. If you feel confused about the future and are interested in oracle technology, it might be worth a look.
A Russian Boy Who Dismantles Things
Born in the Soviet Union in 1986, Nazarov's parents were both engineers. He first sat in front of a keyboard when he was just five years old. Although he ultimately did not take a technical route, influenced by his family, he learned how to understand technical issues and how to collaborate efficiently with technical personnel. As a child, Nazarov was captivated by one thing: dismantling objects and then putting them back together again, turning his home’s television and vacuum cleaner into his toys. Perhaps it was during this hands-on process that the philosophy of "deconstructing complex problems and providing solutions" took root in his heart.
In the early 1990s, the Soviet Union underwent dramatic changes. Many state-owned scientific research institutions and engineering units dissolved, and people found that the iron rice bowl jobs they thought would last a lifetime shattered overnight, while prices spiraled out of control. In such a historical context, emigration became the common choice for that generation of engineers and intellectuals—Nazarov's family immigrated to New York. Years later, Stani Kulechov, the founder of Aave, who would intersect with him in the DeFi and RWA sectors, moved with his family from Estonia to Helsinki, Finland. To some extent, their starting points share similar historical backgrounds.
Meeting a Life-Changing Benefactor
Like most education-focused families, Nazarov's parents also emphasized the cultivation of character. In 2007, Sergey Nazarov graduated from New York University, majoring in Philosophy and Management. Shortly after graduating, he entered the investment and start-up circle, where his boss was the influential Lawrence Lenihan.
Lenihan was not a traditional professor focused solely on academic research, but a practitioner who had achieved a certain level of success in the industry and was invited by universities for guest lecturing. His career began at IBM, and he started his own business in 1996, co-founding the venture capital firm Pequot Ventures, which later evolved into FirstMark Capital—a firm that ranks among the upper tier of New York's venture capital circle, having invested in projects like Pinterest, Shopify, and Riot Games (later acquired by Tencent for $400 million).
After graduating, Nazarov joined FirstMark Capital, led by Lenihan, and rose from a grassroots position to become an analyst, officially entering New York's core venture capital circle; at the same time, around 2010, he served as a teaching assistant for the technology entrepreneurship course that Lenihan offered at NYU Stern School of Business. From his public profile, it is likely that during this time, Nazarov gained recognition from Lenihan and subsequently received greater opportunities; however, Lenihan was not simply feeding resources without thought; Nazarov had clearly gone through trials and proven himself at each step before gaining a larger stage.
Want to Start a Business? Start by Observing
While having a benefactor's help is important, Nazarov deeply understands the principle of self-help and self-improvement. During his time at FirstMark, he began his first startup: a small company called Exist Local Inc. that was similar to Airbnb, helping users who wanted to experience New York in-depth find individuals willing to provide services, creating a P2P platform for local experiences. This venture was relatively unremarkable, more of a practice attempt, but it helped Nazarov build up the courage and experience to start a business.
After some time running his side venture, Nazarov resigned from FirstMark Capital and dedicated himself fully to entrepreneurship. He turned his attention back to his hometown of Russia and established a venture capital firm, QED Capital, trying to bring the methods he had learned in New York’s venture capital circle—such as how to filter projects, how to work with founders to refine their direction, and how to participate in board decision-making—to the still-maturing Russian tech teams, following a relatively gentle and founder-friendly approach instead of the traditional VC's relentless pursuit of control.
Unfortunately, Nazarov's ideal reform for tech venture capital did not yield much publicly verifiable investment success. But perhaps the root cause is not that his attempts failed, but rather that in the process of observing others' projects daily, he began to harbor a concrete technical problem in his mind—seeing more led him to find that no one was tackling it, so he decided to jump in himself.
From Investing in Others to Solving His Own Problems
It is worth mentioning that even during his time at QED Capital, this entrepreneur, who was always juggling multiple jobs, rented GPUs to mine Bitcoin and made substantial profits—he recouped his investment in the first week of a three-month rental period. One could say that Nazarov's interest in the cryptocurrency industry emerged earlier than many imagine.
Around 2014, Nazarov shifted his entrepreneurial direction, returned to New York, and tried three different projects within a year: first a brief attempt at a decentralized email project called CryptaMail, quickly followed by Secure Asset Exchange (SAE), and then founding Smart Contract—which would become the precursor to Chainlink.
Among these three projects, CryptaMail was just a brief exploration, with a focus on Secure Asset Exchange and Smart Contract. The two projects shared a co-founder—Steve Ellis. Ellis, also a graduate of New York University, received his computer science degree in 2010 and can be considered a junior of Nazarov. After graduating, he worked as a software engineer at Pivotal Labs, focusing on the development of payment automation systems—this was closely related to the later automated settlement and payment-triggering oracle networks. In 2014, Ellis and Nazarov clicked, with one taking the role of CTO and the other as CEO, a division of labor that has continued to this day.
An Early Form of DeFi
If we were to compare their two entrepreneurial projects to children, the firstborn, Secure Asset Exchange, is a typical case of having ideas that are ahead of its time, while the market was not yet prepared. Understanding Secure Asset Exchange allows for a better comprehension of Nazarov's later thought process, as well as a better understanding of RWA and DeFi.
In 2014, Ethereum was still in the conceptual and preparatory stages (officially launching in 2015), and there was a chain on the market called Nxt that had relatively similar functionalities. The goal of Secure Asset Exchange was to help users purchase digital assets on the Nxt chain without downloading the Nxt client, using their BTC directly. Furthermore, these assets could be designed to have on-chain contracts similar to "crypto bonds," "crypto equity," or other contracts with automated revenue distribution mechanisms, allowing users to earn returns according to pre-agreed rules automatically.
Looking at it today, this idea resembles a blend of DeFi, RWA, and on-chain securitization; however, in 2014, it faced an awkward problem: the on-chain assets themselves weren’t numerous or high-quality enough, prompting users to better hold onto their BTC. Additionally, the Nxt ecosystem was still too early, with insufficient developers and users to form a network effect. Due to multiple reasons, by early 2016, Secure Asset Exchange, which had maintained operations for about a year and a half, announced its shutdown.
The Real Problem: How to Ensure Data Connectivity
In comparison, the Smart Contract, established a few months later, seemed to have found the right direction from the start. It secured seed round financing led by Underscore VC, with Data Collective participating—enough funding to support the team for a long period.
At that time, Ellis and Nazarov had begun writing smart contracts for large financial institutions and insurance companies, but encountered a recurring problem during delivery: how to connect internal contracts with external data and APIs. They discovered this market gap and gradually shifted their focus towards oracles that transmit external information.
However, the underlying technology of oracles is largely similar; how could they gain the trust of banks? They thought of the method: to enter competitions and obtain one of the traditional financial world's hardest-to-get tickets. In 2016, Smart Contract participated in the Industry Challenge hosted by SWIFT's Innotribe—a public competition aimed at fintech companies across the industry, focusing on how to use blockchain to transform the lifecycle management of securities.
Smart Contract ultimately emerged victorious and was invited to share at SWIFT's annual conference, Sibos, showcasing an automated bond lifecycle solution based on smart contracts.
The following year, at the 2017 Sibos conference, Nazarov led the team to present an even more advanced live demonstration: using oracles to integrate external LIBOR interest rate data into smart contracts, automatically calculating interest for a bond, and generating messages compliant with the ISO 20022 standard to issue settlement instructions via the SWIFT network. This is also considered the starting point of the partnership between Chainlink and SWIFT, and for many years afterward, Nazarov continued to participate in the Sibos conference, with Chainlink gradually becoming one of the most important partners in the banking industry.
It can even be said that if one day the cryptocurrency industry is proven to be a fallacy, the services provided by Chainlink will still be needed by large financial institutions—because it solves not only the problem of on-chain and off-chain information communication but also speeds up the settlement process. The settlement in traditional systems requires multiple intermediate steps for confirmations: the initiating bank, the custodian bank, the clearinghouse, the counterparty's custodian bank, and the counterparty's bank must all book, verify, and confirm separately, with many steps only processed in fixed time slots on workdays. By introducing the oracle network, multiple nodes can synchronize reading and verifying data, and after confirming accuracy, simultaneously push settlement instructions, no longer restricted by the bank's working hours.
Today, Chainlink has established public collaborations with a series of large financial institutions, including SWIFT, DTCC (the U.S. Securities Depository and Clearing Corporation), Euroclear (one of the largest securities infrastructures in Europe), Clearstream (the securities infrastructure under the Deutsche Börse system), Citi, and JPMorgan.
Postscript
After detailing Nazarov’s first half, what is most enlightening for me is not how significant the concept of “oracles” is, but rather the path he chose, which is largely replicable:
First, enter a sufficiently good environment—it could be school, a company, or a community. Work diligently on the present task, gain recognition, and from that, gain the support of benefactors, then leverage that to step onto a larger platform.
During this process, continue to accumulate and experiment, even if, like Exist Local, QED Capital, CryptaMail, and Secure Asset Exchange, one pays a considerable amount in "tuition," it can lead to finding the market's true needs and identifying directions one wishes to delve into.
Once you've identified the direction, earn the industry's recognized ticket through solid competitions, and then persistently solve real problems for practitioners for ten years without getting distracted by storytelling, conceptualization, or marketing efforts.
This might also explain why I continue to hold trust in the industry. Even if many people are pessimistic and others are fishing in murky waters, there are always individuals investing their youth and wisdom here, striving to solve one real issue after another.
And Nazarov is just one of them.
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